I appreciate my colleague's comments. You should never feel badly about not being a lawyer. Lawyers are not the possessors of the absolute truth. If you have three lawyers in a room, you may end up with three different interpretations. And I'm not trying to insult anyone by saying this.
I say that with the greatest love for my profession, but that's part of our DNA, I suppose, and at the same time the difficulty we face all the time is to use the words that really represent what we're trying to say. It's not always easy.
I never claim to know the absolute truth.
I read and re-read the document by Cynthia Kirkby and Havi Echenberg, published by the Library of Parliament, and it was worth it. It was a legislative summary of elder abuse. The authors quoted some jurisprudence.
In R. v. Kralik, the judge said:
I must also bear in mind, as I am directed by s. 718.2 of the Criminal Code, that a sentence should be increased or reduced to account for any relevant aggravating or mitigating circumstances relating to the offence or the offender. Certain factors are deemed to be aggravating factors, but the factors listed in s. 718.2 are only examples of aggravating factors. In my view, abuse of a frail, isolated elderly person, particularly an elderly person who was “not as sharp as she once was,” can be considered an aggravating factor.
In this case, the judge is not asking that the impact be significant. My concern, when we are talking about a senior, is that we are creating a new way of seeing things that goes against what all the witnesses have said, both the witnesses for the government and for both the opposition parties.
The offences in the case my colleague, Mr. Leef, mentioned, involved property. So we can't talk about aggravating offences. If I get into a senior's car with the intention of scaring that person, it isn't the fact of getting into the car that is an offence, but wanting to terrorize that person. That is something different. If someone just hits a person who happens to be a senior, the ruling will not even be based on that. We are talking here about offences against the person, be they assault, financial offences or others still. I understand the fact that we want to use section 380.1 in a specific case of fraud where you want to see a significant impact. But if we are talking about an assault, say someone pushes a senior, that may not have a significant impact.
These are comments I heard when I started talking to people in my riding about Bill C-36. I told myself that they would be proud of us because we were going to vote with the government on this. I think it is a good bill. But when I explained to people what it involved, they invariably told me that it was still flawed, that the criminals would get away with it and that we, the politicians, were only finding loopholes for them.
So this is what I'm bringing forward. I think this is what should be applied. It doesn't revolutionize the Criminal Code. I didn't hear the department representative speak about it. This summarized precisely what we want to do, which is to put an end to elder abuse.
I won't say any more. That is my opinion, and I am sharing it.